General Fundraising

Data masters

When your school sets up a development office, an effective fundraising database should be at the top of the shopping list. Kate Chernyshov explains the benefits of this essential support system for your campaigns

You may well begin your fundraising by using Microsoft Office Access, or a version of it that has been enhanced by a former pupil who took the records from the card index file and computerised them, allowing you to print off labels when you mail your alumni magazine to the hundreds who still pay their £5 subs.

The next stage, an inevitable evolution, will be driven by users’ needs. You should add a former pupil’s dates at the school, record what house they were in, and connect them to a relation who is also on the database.

You should record their work and home email addresses and their employment history. Then when they start making a regular donation, you should record the gift aid declaration, identify what prompted them to give, how much they gave, create a direct debit and a reminder to send them a card on their 60th birthday. Moreover, now that they are planning to send their children to your school, you need to see what news the headmaster’s secretary is sending to them, the name of the family’s charitable trust that pays the school fees, and what teams their children play in, so that you can discover who they talk to on the touchline on a Saturday afternoon.

Then a certain housemaster leaves after 30 years’ service teaching English and cricket, and you want to invite around 200 people to his farewell event. You will need a mailing list that includes everyone who was in his house or has an interest in cricket and who was at the school between 1979 and 2009. Segmentation can greatly reduce your mailing costs and allows you to personalise the invitation letter. You should also add the invitation to the records on the database so that you can collate replies.

Or the leavers of 1979 decide to get together for an informal reunion, and they want to find out what happened to an old friend. You should put a section of your database on the web so that they can find each other to update their addresses or change their employment details. And while they’re at it, you could put up an advert on the website telling them that a drinks event is taking place to recruit some fresh blood for the old girls’ hockey team.

Gathering data
While you could manage some of this on your Access database, and you can glean bits of information from chats in the common room or school events, actually you need a database to record the information you have discovered, or pass it on to your successor or share it with other members of your team.

In the past I’ve used Raiser’s Edge. It’s the alleged Rolls-Royce of a database, but in many schools it is driven like a Ford Escort. An American product, it memorably offered a choice of three genders when adding a new record: male, female or transgender. I’m currently using In Touch, which is one of the more widely used databases in UK schools’ development offices. However, we are switching to PASS, so that I can share information with the accounts teams and the marketing and admissions teams, perhaps even the bursar’s office, the director of studies, the sports and activities teams and the headmaster.

There are many other databases on the market and they’re all eager to win your business, while adding bells, whistles and balloons to their products. No doubt there will soon be a solar-powered one for your mobile phone...

Kate Chernyshov is the development director at Lord Wandsworth College in Hampshire.

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